Verizon comes out ahead of rivals AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint in nearly every category of performance — including reliability, data speeds and phone calls — in a new study of the U.S. wireless market by RootMetrics.

However, the report says T-Mobile made noticeable improvements in larger cities, based on the wireless company’s ongoing investments in metro areas. According to the RootMetrics data, T-Mobile came out ahead of Sprint in overall performance and logged its best overall result yet in head-to-head comparisons in urban areas.

And AT&T made progress against Verizon in many areas, with RootMetrics calling it “an even tighter race than what we saw in the second half of 2013.”

“No matter how you slice it, Verizon continues to shine,” says RootMetrics in its Midyear Mobile Network Performance Report, released tonight and covering the first half of 2014.

The report continued, “It dominated across all levels of our testing, with strong first-place finishes in our national, state, and metro results. AT&T, however, was clearly the second-best performer and in many cases did not trail Verizon by a substantial margin. Those two networks remained a step above Sprint and T-Mobile, but T-Mobile is moving fast in cities and has made real gains at the metro level.”

However, the reported added, “If you are primarily a data user or if reliability is most important to you, it’s worth noting that Sprint and T-Mobile markedly trailed the top two networks in our data category and our Network Reliability Index at the national level.”

After the previous version of the RootMetrics report, for the second half of 2013, T-Mobile executives lambasted the RootMetrics numbers, saying that its own crowdsourced tests showed its network outperforming its competitors. We’ve contacted T-Mobile for comment on the latest RootMetrics numbers.

RootMetrics says its team drove more than 234,000 miles to collect the data in the first half of the year, in 125 large cities, 50 states, and rural areas.

T-Mobile has been adding customers steadily each quarter by challenging many of the wireless industry’s traditions, including contracts and international roaming charges. with Sprint’s pricing changes serving as the latest evidence of the increased competition.

After Sprint’s plan to acquire T-Mobile fizzled earlier this month, T-Mobile CEO John Legere said he expects T-Mobile to top Sprint in overall subscribers by year end.